The truth about the leaking of Velox 2.

Before I say anything more, I think this guy was a total asshole and that threatening to leak Velox 2 was an assholish thing to do. However, I firmly believe that no one deserves to be subjected to the wrath Internet vigilantism, as it does no good for anyone involved except for maybe the people doing the vigilantism. To express why I think this, I'm gonna go back in time to November 2013.

This being Reddit, I'm pretty much entirely certain you know of /r/gaming, and there's a good chance that you know about /r/pcmasterrace. If you don't know anything about the two subreddits, take the iOS vs Android fan wars, slap a picture of a gaming PC over one of them and an Xbone over another, and you have a good representation of what it's really like (or go to any YouTube video about the consoles and read the comments). Lots of shit gets flung between both sides, and /r/pcmasterrace has been the focal point of the casual pro-PC stuff since around May 2013. /r/gaming, by contrast, was and still is largely dominated by console fans.

With this in mind, in mid-November a PCMR user posts an image of his gaming rig on /r/gaming. A mod there removes it on the grounds of it not being intrinsically related to gaming, which he objects to. This exchange gets posted to PCMR and immediately gains traction on the front page, leading to tons of cries of Reddit-variety "oppression" and "censorship." The mod in question comes to defend himself, but is downvoted to oblivion by the angry mob forming.

The next five days saw the conflict escalating; while most users were content to just prod at the mod's statements (like that the PC pictured could have been built for taxes), a large number of PCMR users began downvoting go every post the mod ever made, harassing the /r/gaming moderation, and harassing the mod via PM. Eventually, the mod in question is doxxed, and everything comes to a head on November 19th when another user calls the mod's local police department, claims he killed his girlfriend, and was planning on detonating a bomb. A SWAT team is deployed to neutralize the nonexistent threat, and after a lot of confusion it's eventually confirmed it was all a hoax. Frankly, the details are still a bit fuzzy about this, but I did confirm with the admins that this actually happened.

When the dust settled and the mod tells the administrators what happened, they banned /r/pcmasterrace from the site, a fate shared by only the most toxic subreddits. Confusion reigned supreme among the ~16,000 users browsing at the time (of ~50,000 subscribers), but with an absence of a clear and logical explanation, their attention congealed on the only logical explanation: /r/gaming, clearly looking to eliminate PCs from the gaming world once and for all, bribed Reddit into removing our totally harmless and innocent sub from the site! Within an hour, their entire front page is filled top to bottom with pro-PC posts, and for the only time in recorded subreddit history, they had a net loss of subscribers.

Pedro, PCMR's head mod, begged and pleaded with the admins to unban the sub and to give him control of it. Between his promises that such a brigade would never happen again and the anarchy occurring on /r/gaming, the subreddit was given back to him within a day, and the sub reopened half a day later. We gained a surge of popularity in the days following from those who weren't following what happened, and we took on a number of mods to help keep things same (I was the last of the senior team, joining last March).

However, the event turned us into the laughingstock of the gaming community, an it severely strained our relations between subreddits. I find it a little sad that we were congratulated by the admins for not brigading since then...

For reference, a guy had a SWAT team sent to his house because he removed a picture of a gaming PC.

In my opinion, no one deserves to be targets by "le reddit army." If there's one thing that Reddit isn't very good at, I'd say it would be exercising self restraint.

/r/jailbreak Thread